We Went West...to get 2 points

In the past 2 years I´ve played away games almost in the same places (København, Aalborg and Odense), this year we are going west too. In the first part of the season we visited Esbjerg (better know here as Fiskeby), thursday we went to Bedsted. I never went that far before, I visited Mos, but I never entered Thy.

It was nice, a warm gym, great hot-water showers and a gym with tarmac instead of parquet. It´s since I was still playing in Italy I haven´t played in a gym with tarmac and a lot of memories came back that evening. Memories of great games, of wonderful team-mates, of battles over (but almost under) the net, of good players I´ve played against (many of them playing now in A2 or B1), of unforgivable losses: in few words, a different volley, based more on emotions, on fights, on energy, on power.

I don´t want to say that there are no emotions, no power, no energy here in Denmark, what I mean is that there are not as much as I used to had.
I wasn´t playing in a big national division, I´ve always played in C League and every year our goal was to reach the play-offs. Sometimes we made it, sometime we didn´t. We had 4 practises per week and games on saturday evening [the beauty of playing saturday at 21:00 is that you can go out crazy on friday night, and have a whole day to "recover" before the match....as I said, I didn´t play in a national division]: even if the level I used to play can be compared with the one of the Elite division, I´ve never had video sessions, never had statistics to study, never had hitting directions to remember or special block tactics. During the week we worked a lot on individual technic and game situations with the goal to improve our weaknessess.

Doing that, every point won during games, every set won during matches, every match won during a season, was felt as a personal achievement, we were really playing against someone we didn´t know how they would serve, where they would hit, how they would hit: it was like going to an exam without having studied. For this reason, every point was a great event, every seat needed to be celebrate, every victory was followed by a week of happiness because everything had been achieved thanks to our selve, thanks to our attitude to adjust our tactics every week-end, thanks to our wish to win: thanks to our abilities to find which was the best way to play to win that particular game. Victories tasted better down there!!!!

Here in Denmark almost everyone does statistics, (video sections, hitting directions, zones where to serve, setting tendences and so on) and it´s not a bad thing, I´m in charge of that in ASV now, I give suggestions to my coach about what would be our best strategy. What I wanted to say is that I have to opportunity to compare 2 different ways of game´s approach, where the volleyball level is almost the same. Doing that, I can say, once again, everything up here is too "cold": as there is not so much happiness for every ball won, there is not too much frustration for evey ball lost, but off course everybody prefers to remember good moments and good moments, for me, have been better in Italy.

This post was ment to talk about the match and I´ll do shortly as I have to get preprared for today's match.
We won 3-1 (15-25; 20-25; 25-20; 18-25), we didn´t play that well but they played worst, and I was enough to get 2 points. I can say that has been 2 easy points, and I hope (better, I wish) that Copenhagen´s teams will face more problems playing here, specially after a 6 hour journey.